


the people on the edge of the night

by nikomiel



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Guardian Angels, Angst, Depression, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Self-Harm, possible trigger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-20
Packaged: 2018-03-10 11:25:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 16,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3288608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nikomiel/pseuds/nikomiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kageyama has neither a fence nor an ambulance, and he is hurtling towards the edge.</p>
<p>Then he meets the most annoying angel in history,<br/>who saves his life and breaks his heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Give Ourselves (One More Chance)

**Author's Note:**

> Please, avoid reading this if it is likely to trigger you. I hope that I have treated this issue with the understanding it deserves, as far as my experience allows. 
> 
> I don't believe in angels, but I believe in Kagehina

As he woke up, it was there.

The feeling suffused him like a blanket, hung around him and in him. It was deep inside his chest and hanging patiently at the corner of his vision.  
It was a heavy tiredness. It was a lukewarm apathy. It was a blue-grey depression.

He looked to the ceiling and wondered why he had to wake up.

Especially today.

Today, it gets worse.

He could sense when it was going to be a bad day. It was like the smell before rain, the pulsing dread before receiving a bad mark in school. It was a little annoying, that he was so terrible at every aspect of education yet could predict his own state of mind with perfect accuracy.

He pondered this on the way to school, mechanically chewing an apple and waiting it out.

It gets worse.

Class was class, as always. Everybody was moving too fast and speaking too loud. Sometimes, he feels like he is the only one moving at normal speed, and everyone else is sped up, like someone has pointed a remote at them and hit fast forward. Sometimes he feels like he is living underwater.

It gets worse.

He ate lunch alone. The sullen blonde at the vending machine gave him a nod, and his freckled friend/admirer/pet puppy actually smiled at him today. He felt a little overwhelmed by all the social contact, and resolved to find a quieter spot in the courtyard.

It gets worse.

In the end, he lasted all day until he got home. Unlocking his door, dropping his bag softly by the kitchen bench. Milk box in the rubbish, jacket over the chair. Pretending nothing was going to happen, until it happened and he was shaking in the bathroom with the razor in his hand.

It gets worse.

The first time, his hands shook like crazy. Now they are still with a kind of surgical accuracy (it sickens him; that he has gotten good at this.). He hates the need inside him. Why does he need this? He doesn’t want to need this. but the pain bursts under his skin, the desperation rises like a tide inside his body and he has to set it free, has to do SOMETHING, has to raise the slit of silver and watch the scarlet and rust until the need subsides and he is left sobbing in the corner of the bathroom, alone.

His jeans go in the washing machine. He puts tissue over his forearm, pulls on a sleeved shirt.

Razor in his left-hand drawer.

It gets better.

It gets worse.

 x

His forearms ache during dinner. His mother watches him as he takes a sip of water, painfully. He avoids the pity in her dark eyes, blue like his own, and tries to ignore the itching.

“How was school?”  
The question is soft like usual, exasperated like always.

He doesn’t bother answering, and there is silence.

 

He dreams about volleyball again.

He is tossing the ball, smooth and heavy in his palms. Oikawa is yelling to him, yelling that there is no one there, but suddenly a stranger bursts into his peripherals and soars up to catch the ball-

Feathers, floating around the court and tangling in the net before them.

The stranger lands, turns to smile at him, but his face is too bright to make out, and golden wings unfurl from his back-

 

He wakes up with a gasp. There is a humming noise floating around the room, rousing him from his dreams of angels playing volleyball. Confused, he stands up, and-

The room around him seems to close in, and the air thrums as a swirling darkness cracks itself open before him.

Lightening and thunder fill the black hole that i s yawning in the middle of the bedroom, until a light flares inside and swallows up the blackness, swallows up his room, the air itself is on fire-

A silhouette in blazing light-

The room tilting, a sickening pain webbing out from the back of his head-

Nothing.


	2. Introductions and Deductions

He was roused by a stinging slap to the cheek.

“Oi! What the fu-“  
Thankfully, he was cut off by the appearance of a small, pointed face, hanging over his forehead. The face was framed by fluffy chunks of orange which he could only assume was meant to be hair, and eyes the colour of hazelnut were regarding him worriedly.  
He sat up, and instantly regretted it. Moaning, he lay back on his elbows, and tried not to puke.  
The anxious face briefly disappeared from view. He felt light fingers scamper over his hair, and was about to slap them away when he felt cool air blowing over the bump swelling over the back of his head.

The pain lifted.

“That better?”  
The unfamiliar, rather high-pitched voice startled him out of his temporary shock. Spinning round, he glared at the small orange boy crouched by his bookcase.  
“Who the hell are you? Why the hell are you in my room? What is with your hair? Are you a human, or some kind of orang-utan hybrid?!”  
The boy pouted. “I know you’re only being mean because you’re scared, but I just saved you from concussion.”  
He spluttered, rubbing his cheek. “You caused my concussion by magically appearing in my room and knocking me into my bookcase, you psycho! Then apparently you decided to wake me up by slapping the crap out of my face!”  
The boy chewed his lip. “Er… yeah. Sorry about that. Anyway…”  
He jumped to his feet, smiling with the burning energy of a thousand suns. “My name is Hinata Shouyou, and I am your guardian angel!”

There was a shocked silence.

“You’re psychotic. Get out of my room, and I won’t call the police.”  
The psycho (who was cute, for a psycho, once you got past the hair) looked stunned. “You don’t believe me? I just zapped myself into your room and healed your head!”

Finding no way to argue with this, he hissed in reply, “Thanks for nothing. I don’t need a guardian angel, especially not a violent midget one. Now. Get. Out.”  
Hinata chewed his lip in a disarmingly cute way. “You’re so rude, I wish I could leave. But you’re my assignment. It’s angel law.”  
“You-“  
“Let’s start by sharing names. What’s yours?”

He gritted his teeth. “Kageyama Tobio. My hobbies include sleeping and milk boxes. Now get the hell out of my room.”

Angrily deciding that it had to be some kind of painful dream, he strode back to his bed and defiantly lay facing the wall.

“If I wake up and you’re still here, we’ll see if angels can get arrested.”  
“Actually you’re the only one who can see m-“  
Kageyama snored, loudly and very falsely, and the angel shut up.

 

x

When he woke up, there was an angel perched on his bookcase, reading Hamlet and sucking his thumb.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

He stood up angrily, and swayed as sparkling dots of light fizzled their way up his vision, rising to the top of his head.  
A cool hand gripped his elbow.  
“Head rush. You don’t eat enough, you’re so lanky. I thought volleyball players were meant to eat a tonne?”  
Kageyama sat down heavily, panting a little. “How do you-“  
Hinata pointed to the ball, slightly deflated, by his desk.

“I think I used to play too, when I was alive.”

Kageyama was about to say something mean, but the look on the angel’s face was so familiar that the words slid back down his throat. It was a look of sad nostalgia, and it was the look he felt himself wearing every time he passed the gym at junior high.

"It's kinda weird, that I don't remember something as important as volleyball. I can barely picture a game. I just remember the way it  _feels_ , y'know? When you open your eyes and the expanse of the opposite side of the net is laid out waiting in front of you. When it feels like someone hit pause on the world, right when you're at the top, and you can think so clearly that you just  _know_ you're going to win the point."

"You were a middle blocker."

Hinata looks at him, a little surprised. "You can tell that from me rambling about hitting pause on the world?"

Kageyama closes his eyes, picturing it. "You got tossed to a lot, even though you're short. You must have had some kind of special skill or relationship with the setter."

They sat there, thinking about it. Kageyama was fully aware that it was time to leave for school, but here was a real live angel talking to him about volleyball, and it seemed like kind of a waste to ditch it for his 9am statistics class. He hadn't talked about volleyball for years.

Hinata snapped his fingers, totally spoiling their easy silence. "I got it! Maybe I could jump really high! Like really,  _really_ high, like I was flying or something!"

Kageyama scoffed. "With those scrawny legs? They'd snap like toothpicks if you tried to jump more than a centimetre."

Scowling, the angel folded his arms and regarded Kageyama with a peeved expression. "Alright, hotshot. What are  _you?_ Setter?"

He winced. "Was. Yeah."

"Knew it! Setters are always jerks. That's why they play so well." He paused, squinting at Kageyama's carefully blank face. "So are you good? Are you a rep or something?"

He looked away. “I don’t play anymore.”

  
The angel sat on the bed, next to him. “Why not?”  
He swallowed, feeling his throat close up in defence. “I just…”  
A face swam before him, laughing with sparkling dark eyes. Slim fingers flicking through locks of thick wavy hair.  
His coach was saying something to him, telling a joke, and all he could concentrate on were his perfect lips moving and-

He closed his eyes.

“I just moved on. Now I practice being invisible instead.”

Hinata laughed, and the sound bubbled out in a cascading chuckle. “Yeah, I have that problem too.”


	3. Intensity

Angels, Kageyama decided very quickly, were rivalled only by mosquitoes in their ability to annoy the ever-loving crap out of him.  
Hinata Shouyou may be some holy being crafted out of light itself, but he also liked to talk.  
A LOT.  
Hissing the wrong answers to Kageyama in maths class. Trying to get him to buy grape juice at the vending machine. Tugging him towards the Aoba Jousai gym. Constantly asking him about his meds, his forearms, the silence during dinner time. The single bed in his mother’s room.

It was driving him insane, which is how he came to be googling “home exorcism guardian angels” in the library after school, three days later.

The Aoba Jousai Junior High School library was a daunting place, all shiny new Apple Macs and towering bookcases. It smelled like an odd combination of candle wax and lemon soap, with the occasional whiff of hot noodles whenever some poor fool was stupid enough to try and smuggle lunch into a study session.

Kageyama had avoided the gaggle of students, playing Mario Kart and pretending to look over their chemistry textbooks, and made a beeline straight for the ancient PCs by the geography section. The clackety ones with the sticky spacebars that everyone hated.  
It took about twenty minutes to boot one up, and even then getting it to behave was tricky business, but here was a place that he could swear at his guardian angel without receiving any funny looks.

Hinata was pouting over his shoulder, and the light was making it difficult to read the monitor. Kageyama waved him away, annoyed.

“God, don’t you come equipped with a dimmer or something?”

He hated how his tone of irritation was beginning to have undertones of fondness to it. Sure, Hinata talked incessantly and took way too much of an interest into Kageyama’s personal life, but it was nice to have someone more tragic than he was. After all, he reasoned, being dead at seventeen had to suck.

He just hoped he could get rid of him before they actually started to be _friends_.

And then. Oh, and _then_ , it happened.

Hinata squished his face up against Kageyama’s, trying to read. He smelled warm, like the pavement after rain, or freshly laundered sheets. His cheeks were just as soft. Kageyama tried to look like he wasn’t noticing, and ignored the painful, nervous judder lancing its way up his spine as the angel leaned even closer.  
 _Calm down. You’re just freaked out about being cheek-to-cheek with an angel._  
Hinata reached out to touch the mouse, their fingers bumped together, another painful jolt shot up his back, and Hinata looked at him to say-

“Yahoo Answers? Seriously, Kageyama?”

Kageyama blinked and glared back at him, suddenly and inexplicably disappointed. He changed it to anger without skipping a beat.

“Well your stupid angel law isn’t helping any, so why the hell not?”  
“Oh so instead you’re going to trust the word of that well-known exorcist, ' _rainbowcristalheart67'_?”  
“Gah!”

Kageyama angrily threw himself off his wheelie chair, grabbing his bag and stalking towards the exit.

“God, why don’t you just leave me alone?!”

He strode off amidst the whispering, and Hinata had no choice but to follow.

x

Kageyama ignored him for a whole fifty hours, for reasons he didn’t care to investigate, before a bad morning hit him like a tonne of bricks and he found himself bolting out of the Aoba Jousai courtyard, lungs burning and heart pounding.

He ran, faster and further than he had run since training in junior school, until his legs began to ache and spots swam in his vision. He wasn’t sure if Hinata had followed him, and he couldn’t care less. He had to get out of there, it was getting worse, he had to be somewhere else, he had to-

Finally, panting, he slump against the back door of some convenience store, miles from the school grounds.  
Here, in the dust and dirt, his thoughts began to settle themselves into coherent shapes, and he started to breathe.

 

When Hinata finally caught up, Kageyama was crouched against a brick wall, watching a line of ants crowd around his shoe.  
He didn’t look up as Hinata silently joined him.  
“I thought guardian angels were meant to make people’s lives easier, not earn them a reputation as a schizo.”

The angel winced a little at the monotonous remark, and moved closer.  
“Is it… a bad day?”

The ants were now triumphantly carrying away a breadcrumb from by Kageyama’s shoelace, ferrying it across the pebbly pavement to the safety of the long grass. He didn’t answer, watching them.

“You can talk to me, you know. It’s why I’m here.”

Kageyama stood up, narrowly avoiding crushing the last of the ants, and threw Hinata a thunderous glare. “No. You are here because apparently my depression has morphed into psychosis. You are here because I am crazy, and apparently having no friends means my brain has decided to take a DIY approach and imagine some instead. You are not real, Hinata. You are _fictional_ , and I just want you to leave me alone.”  
 _Before I develop a fairly sizeable crush on a product of my own crazy_ , he finished silently in his head.

Hinata was watching him with the oddest expression on his face, still perched on the ground. His fingers were toying with one lace of his sneakers, tying and untying it into complex knots in a gesture Kageyama wasn’t even sure he was aware of.  
Eventually, he visibly swallowed, and opened his mouth.  
“So what if I’m fictional?”

It was not the answer Kageyama was expecting from the unstoppable Hinata Shouyou, but it floored him nonetheless.  
“Excuse me?”

Hinata stood up, and as his intensity flared, so did the aura coating his entire body, until Kageyama had to squint to make out his liquid brown eyes.

“So what if I’m not real? I am still here for a reason, Kageyama. Maybe you’re dreaming me up, but that doesn’t matter. I can still be here for you. I can still be someone for you. You never let anyone in, but you have never dreamed up anyone like me, so maybe this is how you are going to help yourself.”

“That’s stupid,” Kageyama said mechanically, although Hinata was starting to make a lot of unwanted sense.

“I want to believe I’m an angel. But that doesn’t matter, because that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because you need me.”

He took a deep breath, and put a hand on Kageyama’s shoulder. The fingers were cold, yet the light around them was suffused in warmth. The judder flew up his back again.

“So here I am. Let’s get started.”


	4. In A Flash (Everything Changes)

He was starting to fall for the angel living in his peripheral vision.

It wasn’t just that Hinata was pretty. It was that he was _so_ pretty, it legitimately hurt Kageyama’s eyes to look at him.

His eyes, liquid brown, were tip-tilted in an inquisitive way. He had a cat’s smile that Kageyama would never tell anyone he had tried replicating in the mirror (whereupon it morphed into a scary clown smile).  
He had a way of tilting his head when he didn’t understand something, which was often, and looking at Kageyama as if he held all the secrets to the universe. His skin was alight, deeper and softer near his body but flaring out to a white light, like a candle, so bright that Kageyama couldn’t stare at him for long.

It would be fine if he were just a pretty face who never shut up. Kageyama would be able to shut him out, ignore him like everyone else. But Hinata wasn’t. He cared, enough to make the stupidest jokes just for the chance of a laugh

_(-Hey, what do you call an alligator wearing a vest? An investigator!_  
Dumbass, that’s the worst joke of all time.  
 _I saw you smile, I saw it!-)_

Enough to ask the questions that Kageyama hated to hear.

_(-Are you okay?_  
No.–

_-Is it a bad day?_  
Like always.-)

Enough to stay.

_(-I’m here._  
Are you?-

_-Yes.-)_

 

He’d cried, openly and messily, when the scars on Kageyama’s forearms refused to heal, until Kageyama had _hugged_ him and told him it didn’t matter, that angels can’t heal everything. He had gazed up at Kageyama, tears streaming unchecked down his bright, cold face, and apologised over and over.

_(-I’m the worst angel in history! I can’t even heal your arms, how the heck am I supposed to guide you through your teenage years?-)_

Kageyama had snorted at the idea of Hinata guiding anyone through their teenage years, but turned it into a cough. There was something about Hinata being genuinely upset that rendered him incapable of making snarky comments.  
And then, embracing Hinata in an awkward hug, eyes squinting from the light, that’s when he realised.

Holding this little angel in his arms made him happier than he could remember.

Everything went away, and the world zoomed in until all that existed was Hinata, sniffling over his jacket and digging his palms into his back. Hinata, who had seen his scars and didn’t flinch but _cried_ for him.  
He expected the jolts up his back now, the shudders up his spine every time they touched.

Oh, he tried to pretend it was platonic. He was just grateful to have someone who cared so deeply for him, who stuck around for his benefit. He was just appreciating the beauty of his angel (Kageyama wasn’t even fooling himself with that one).

Then the dreams came.

Once, Kageyama read that depressed people dream up to three times more than others. At the time, he’d felt a pulse of dull disappointment, that he could never remember his own. How ironic, then, that the only dreams he could remember were the kind that he dearly wished to forget.

The kind of dreams that turned him red-faced when he thought about them later. The kind of dreams that made him thank every deity in history that apparently mind-reading was not among Hinata’s angelic abilities.

It was just getting embarrassing, really.

 

Then things took a sharp left turn when Hinata suggested he move schools.

x

 

It was five on a Thursday. Hinata was sitting on the bed, rubbing Kageyama’s spine as he tried to breathe. It was just not a good day, and he could feel himself being swallowed up by it, just a yawning chasm of Not Good. It was awful.  
But Hinata was there, and it made it less awful. The razor stayed in the drawer.

“Kageyama, do you have any friends?”

He stiffened again.  
Breathed.  
“No. Everyone kind of gave up on me in junior school. And I just…”  
He trailed off, unable to finish the sentence. Hinata’s hands paused on his back, and he unconsciously leaned back against them.  
“Maybe… you need a fresh start. Everyone followed you to Aoba Jousai, right? That coach guy and his friends, at least, from your team.”  
“Oikawa,” Kageyama supplied, cautiously.  
“Yeah, the guy with the stupid hair who always looks at you funny. What’s with that guy, anyway? Jeez, he walks like he’s got a mirror in front of him all the time…”  
Kageyama kept very, very still.  
Hinata, being silly but not completely obtuse, leaned his face over his shoulder. “Dude, you got some beef with that guy or something?”

“Or something.”

There was a long pause.

“Ohhhhh… you had a crush on him, didn’t you?”

The guess came out of nowhere, and Kageyama didn’t even have time to prepare himself. What was worse was that Hinata was, for once, right on the money.  
 _Shitshitshitshitshit_  
He closed his eyes, and that familiar feeling welled up in the back of his mind. It was somewhere between guilt and mortification and frustration and shame.  
“Kageyama?”  
Hinata wriggled next to him, completely ignoring the concept of personal space as usual, and stuck his face closer.  
“Are you… okay? I’m sorry, I didn’t think it would- um, I just didn’t think, I guess, and wow I feel like I’m totally failing at my role right now because I should be saying something comforting and oh my gosh is that why you quit volleyball?”  
“Hinata, slow down,” Kageyama muttered.  
“Sorry. But you shouldn’t have quit because of that! There are people you can talk to and, um…’  
“And what? I should have asked him out?” Kageyama snorted at the idea, but he felt like crying.  
“I don’t know! But quitting isn’t the answer. It made you so happy, I saw that look on your face when I mentioned your ball.” He looked beseechingly at Kageyama, who swallowed and tried to look him in the eye. “Look. Whether you love guys or girls, you love volleyball all the same. So that’s why I thought, maybe you should move to a different school. Make some friends, play some volleyball. It’s suffocating you here.”  
He bit his lip. “It’s killing me too, watching you push yourself through every day there. So I just… well, just think about it, okay?”

There were three things Kageyama was having trouble believing about the whole conversation. One, that Hinata apparently didn’t give a crap that Kageyama was gay; two, that he was actually providing constructive advice; and three, that Kageyama was actually considering said advice.

Moving schools was crazy. He couldn’t uproot and throw himself into a different life. God knows he was having enough trouble with the one he already had.  
But Hinata had mentioned the magic v-word, and now it was all he could think about.

He could play again. It was a fresh start, a new school, a new team.  
He could play again.

“You really think I should move?”

 

x

Nekoma High.  
Date Tech High.  
Fukurodai Academy.

He could remember looking at them all when preparing for Junior High, thinking about their volleyball teams and how he would possibly get to them every day from his mother’s house.

She had laughed at him, making serious decisions based on something as trivial as volleyball. He hadn’t pointed out to her that he needed volleyball, that it was more important to him than grades and rankings and university entrance. It was in the air he breathed, the daydreams that surrounded him as he woke up and fell asleep. He needed to play.  
He also hadn’t pointed out to her how much it would hurt to let that go. Sometimes, he wished he had.  
But then, he wished for a lot of things.

As he absent-mindedly Googled the other volleyball high schools in the prefecture, he remembered a flash of orange and black, shooting to the surface of his memory

_What was it called?_

It used to be one of the best teams in Japan, the school bio had said, before it all went downhill after they lost their top coach.  
There was a saying about it too, something about a fallen bird that once flew high.

_Ravens? Jackdaws? Seagulls?_

He bit back a laugh. There was no way it could be seagulls.

Then, it hit him like a bolt of lightening.  
Crows.  
Karasuno High.

Sipping some chocolate milk, he tapped the name into the search box, ignoring Hinata who was shouting suggestions from the kitchen and playing with his Nintendo DS.

Frowning, he scrolled down the search engine page. School website, high-achieving student bios, directions…. news articles?

He clicked the last link, confused.

Then dropped his glass at the page that surfaced.

 

Hinata came bouncing in, tossing the DS to one side. “Dude! You’re gonna get milk all over the flo- hey, what’re you looking at?”  
He slapped his hand over the monitor a little hysterically, realising too late that he could have simply turned it off.  
“Porn! It’s porn.”  
Hinata looked suspicious, peering through his splayed fingers. “You go on news articles for porn…?”  
Kageyama desperately lurched for the power button, but Hinata had gripped his wrist with surprising strength. “Kageyama, what is it?”  
“I’m so sorry…” Kageyama whispered, but it was too late. Hinata’s face had drained of all colour as he read the headline.

 

_**“KARASUNO MOURNS STUDENT KILLED INSTANTLY IN HIT-AND-RUN”** _


	5. Mini- Chapter: The Fall of the Strongest Decoy

_“The Karasuno High community was left devastated on Monday morning by the death of promising volleyball student Hinata Shouyou, 17._

_The teenager was hit by a car when riding to school on his bike and killed instantly. Police report that the driver has since confessed to being distracted by his cellphone immediately before the accident, causing him to veer into the boy’s path and crash against the bicycle._

_Charges are being considered, but the Hinata family have been unavailable for comment._

_“Hinata Shouyou was a talented player and a joy at Karasuno,” said teammate and senior student Sugawara Koushi. “Our team will think of him every time we play.”_

_Hinata Shouyou left behind a younger sister, devoted mother, and a dedicated group of teammates, who have been leaving orange marigolds at the crash site every morning since._

_The incident has since raised controversy about the use of cellphones when driving, and whether harsher penalties are needed for related accidents.”_


	6. Dead and Alive

The silence in Kageyama’s room was deafening.

Hinata was leaning heavily against his chair, fingers splayed on the armrest and one hand clutching his shirt in a tight fist.  
The light around him was fluctuating wildly, dimming then rising as he hitched in breath after breath.

There was nothing to say, Kageyama knew that.  
There was nothing he could say that could change this.

It broke his heart.

Finally, Hinata blinked away some stray teardrops and inhaled deeply.  
“Well. At least I know I was right – I really did play volleyball.”

His voice sounded strangled, harsh even, and Kageyama turned to look at him.

Hinata wasn’t upset. He was _seething_.

His eyes had gone from wide-eyed disbelief to narrow slits of anger, mouth tight in a slash across his face. Both hands were balled in fists now, and he had risen to be almost on his tiptoes, seemingly lifted up by the force of his fury.

An angry Hinata, Kageyama realised, was a terrifying thing. It was just so, so _wrong_.  
The good-natured cheer and silliness was replaced by a hard rage at the injustice of death at seventeen. A needless, pitiless death, demanded by the universe for no good reason.  
He simply was a boy in the wrong place at the wrong time, stolen from his family by a Prius and a cellphone.

Apparently, none of this was lost on Hinata, who was inches away from exploding.

Then, it happened.

“Of all the… _STUPID GODDAMN WAYS TO DIE_!”

Hinata was kind of yelling in Kageyama’s ear, but he knew that flinching now would be a fatal mistake, so he just sat there and waited out the thunderstorm.

“Are you kidding me? Are you FUCKING kidding me?! I die at seventeen because some idiot couldn’t go without checking his notifications for ten goddamn minutes?! Are you SHITTING me right now?!?!”  
He was breathing heavily, and his aura was flickering like a strobe light. “I was a PROMISING student. Did you read that?! Promising. Student.  
I could have made it to the _championships_. I could have been a goddamn _Olympian_. But no, I had to get hit by a car and die! I had to become some stupid holy babysitter and watch everyone else move on with their lives, stuck in my own little personal hell because I’m dead. I’m dead, and I can’t-“

He dropped to his knees, _hurrrp_ noises escaping his mouth as he tried to breathe.  
“I can’t deal with this. This is too hard.”

The light dimmed almost completely until it was a wavering flicker around his face and skin, weak and fading in and out.

Kageyama, feeling completely out of his depth, awkwardly patted him.  
He felt like he should say something.

“I’m sorry you’re dead.”

He was instantly appalled at himself, and wanted to put his head through the screen of the laptop, but the _hurrrp_ ing noises were slowly morphing into chuckles as Hinata apparently registered what he said.  
“Wow. Is that _seriously_ the best you can do?”  
The light was calming now, rising as Hinata’s fists slowly unclenched themselves and he uncurled from his foetal position on the floor.  
He still looked angry, but it was a soft anger, the kind you feel when you know there is absolutely nothing that will ever solve your problem. Kageyama knew that feeling.

  
“I’m sorry, I’m completely useless, and I know I can never revive you or anything but I really am sorry for this. I’m so, so sorry, Hinata. If I could go back and not look that up, I would.”

  
It was the longest sentence to come out of his mouth since Hinata magically appeared in his room, and the angel was looking at him a little weirdly. He cleared his throat and continued.  
“I mean….” he suggested, trying to rub Hinata’s back and desperately (selfishly) hoping he wasn’t acting too gay right now, “you could always just haunt the guy forevermore.”  
Hinata smirked, tearfully.  
“I can’t. I gotta stick with you.”

And just like that, Kageyama’s heart was _whumph_ ing in his ears and he was staring at the undeniable love of his short, disappointing (thus far) life, who was apparently now totally cool with being dead as long as he could still solve Kageyama’s problems.

It was kind of incredibly romantic, in a horrific sort of way.

 

x

Somehow, through Hinata being either the most selfless or most morbidly curious person Kageyama had ever met, they found themselves on the metro to Karasuno the next morning. It was becoming increasingly difficult not to talk to Hinata in public, so he settled for listening to his iPod and trying not to daydream about makeout sessions with his guardian angel. It was getting to the stupidly soppy stage in which every brooding serenade, every anguished piano-ridden declaration of unrequited love, was applicable to his current dilemma. Kageyama was disgusted with himself.

Stepping off amidst a crowd of commuters pushing their way through the doors, he dimly registered that they were taking a familiar route, but didn’t realise until he actually _passed_ him in the station that this was where his father lived. 

Or at least, he was 99% sure it was his father.

Tall, piercing dark eyes, a stern expression. A thin face tapering off to a pointed chin. He was a dead ringer for an older, grumpier Kageyama, who felt the air  _whoosh_ out of his lungs in surprise at seeing the man who had walked out seven years ago. Today, he thought bitterly, just  _had_ to be the day when he sees his long-lost dad _and_ visits his guardian angel's death site.  He couldn't deal with both at once.  Instantly, he made up his mind not to look back. The reunion could wait.

Barely stopping himself from doing a 180 turn, he tried to keep his eyes forward, but Hinata had to open his mouth and let loose another incredibly accurate guess.

“Man, that guy scowled so hard he could be related to you!”

Thanking Baby Jesus that the man hadn’t seen him since he was ten, and therefore was unlikely to recognise him, Kageyama ducked his head and continued. Hinata’s mouth dropped open.

“Dude! Did we just pass your dad?! Hey, hey, HEY, Kageyama! That was totally your dad!”

“Hinata. Shut _up_!” he hissed, hands stuffed in his jumper and hood protectively around his face.  
Pause.  
“Is he still there?” he muttered, trying not to move his mouth and feeling stupid. Hinata swung around.  
“Nah, he disappeared onto the metro. Did you want to say hi, or…”  
He trailed off. “Oh, my bad. Didn’t realise you weren’t on speaking terms with your own dad.”  
“Dumbass, that’s none of your business” he muttered, piercing through the throng of passengers like a hot knife through butter.  
“None of my business?! You’re on your way to my freaking _gravesite_. Do you really want to talk about what is whose business anymore?!”

Having no answer to that, Kageyama scowled and continued.

 

x

 

 

He heard the squeak and shuffle of volleyball trainers half a mile away from the Karasuno gym. In unison, and without the need for consulting each other, he and Hinata instantly turned towards the doors and crept up to the big windows.  
“Man, I hope I don’t have a mental breakdown from missing this too much,” Hinata whispered. He sounded like he was only half joking.

Peering up through the grubby and stained windows, Kageyama could see figures moving through the court. One tiny silhouette rocketed around the back, rolling and bouncing at top speed.  
“That’s Noya,” Hinata whispered, seeming amazed that he could remember everyone after his bout of angelic amnesia.  
“Libero, right?”  
“Mmm. And that massive guy to his left is Asahi, our ace. Next to him is Daichi, the captain.”  
He paused, frowning.  
“That’s odd. I wonder where Su-“

“Can I help you?”

 

 

x

“So, how did you know Hinata?” Sugawara Koushi asked, walking Kageyama to the vending machine and buying him a milk box (Hinata snickered in the background).  
Ignoring him, Kageyama coughed and desperately thought of a plausible lie.  
“We are…were… volleyball rivals. Met in Junior High volleyball champs. I went to Kitigawa Daiichi, he went to-“  
“Yukigaoka!” Hinata whispered.  
“-Yukigaoka,” Kageyama finished. “We still keep- uh, kept in touch, now and again. He i- was an amazing player.”  
It was giving him a headache, talking about Hinata in past tense, and judging by the look on his angel’s face it wasn’t much fun for _him_ either.  
Sugawara looked at him, and his eyes seemed to bore into Kageyama. He wriggled.  
This guy was _way_ too perceptive.  
Eventually, the senior’s hazel eyes softened as he seemed to accept his hastily crafted backstory. Bending down to pick up his own juice box, he paused in a crouching position, as if preparing himself for the effort of rising.  
“We all miss Hinata very much. It’s too quiet in there. Sometimes it feels like we can’t ever get back to the Karasuno that we were before.” He looked up at Kageyama, mouth twisted a little in sadness. “Tanaka cried in the showers for a week after the accident.”  
“I’m sorry,” Kageyama muttered, fiddling with his straw. “It would be difficult for any team to get through losing one of their own.”  
Sugawara nodded. Finally straightening up, he regarded Kageyama with kindness. “So you’re a player, huh? Come to try out for the team?”  
”Something like that,” Kageyama managed. Hinata had gone very quiet beside him.  
“What position do you play?”  
“Setter,” Kageyama supplied, and the older boy laughed.  
“Come to kick me out of my spot, have you?”  
Smiling, he lead Kageyama back to the gym. “Practice is almost over, but you can join in our finishing game. I’ll sit this one out.”

 

x

The team surrounded Kageyama after the match, everybody talking at once.  
“Dude! That was some seriously intense tossing back there!”  
“How long have you been playing for?”  
“You went to a power school, didn’t you?! Which one?”

The seniors were chuckling, watching Noya and Tanaka hassle the taller boy, who looked half-awkward, half-pleased.  
“Some of those tosses were tough even for me to get,” Tanaka said with a faraway look on his face. “I think the only person who would have been able to get them would have been-“

“Hinata,” Daichi finished, walking up to them. Tanaka made a small choking noise, and Noya patted him soothingly.  
There was a long time in which nobody said anything, all picturing the red-headed boy leaping around the court.

The captain looked at Kageyama, searchingly. Eventually, he smiled. “Well, you’ve got a lot to work on, I’ll tell you that for free. We’d have to make you into a setter that works as a team, not as a single unit.” He paused, and clapped Kageyama on the back. “But if you’re in, we’ll train with you. The other seniors and I will be leaving at the end of the year, and we’ll be looking for a new setter to lead the next group of newbies anyway.”

Hinata was hissing in Kageyama’s ear, _doitdoitdoitdoitDOIT_ , and he desperately restrained himself from swatting him away.  
Sugawara was looking at him, as if he knew, and Kageyama swallowed. A twist of excitement was still strangling his gut, leftover from the rush of playing after so long. It was like he’d had one drink, and already he was dying of thirst.  
But playing for Hinata’s old team could be very, very painful, and the logistics of moving would be messy…  
“Um”, he said finally. “Can I let you know?”  
They smiled. “Of course.”

Suddenly, Asahi appeared at the edge of the group, towering over everyone. “It’s time,” he said, a note of sadness in his voice.

Everybody turned to Kageyama in unison.  
“Every day after practice, we leave flowers at the place where Hinata… well, at the site of his accident.”  
“Marigolds,” Hinata mumbled, remembering the article. Kageyama tried not to look at him, sustaining eye contact with Daichi.  
“Did you want to come?” the captain asked. “It’s not too far from here. It’s a sentimental thing, but we want him to know we won’t forget him, and we like to think that Hinata would appreciate the gesture.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Kageyama saw a single tear spill over Hinata’s cheek.

“I think he would too,” he said.

x

The Azure Flower Shop was _tiny_. Outside, buckets of flowers surrounded the soft blue door, and the handle was barely visible through a towering bunch of lilies.

One by one, the Karasuno team made their way into the shop, until only Sugawara and Kageyama (plus his angel) were left outside.  
“This is where we buy the marigolds,” he said, smiling. “It’s a tiny shop, but we feel like it’s really important to support them, especially now that Hinata’s gone.”  
Kageyama nodded, not really understanding the connection until Sugawara continued.

 

“Did you want to come in and meet her?”  
“Who?” he asked, confused.  
“Hinata’s mother,” Sugawara said, and Hinata inhaled sharply beside him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing about Hinata in past tense is a terrible, terrible thing....
> 
> Thank god it's a sports manga/anime and him actually dying is unlikely :c
> 
> Hope you guys enjoy this chapter


	7. Natsu

There are few things harder than losing a child.

Looking into the face of his angel’s mother, Kageyama could only marvel that she was still talking, still breathing, still _alive_.

Her face was pale, deepening to dark circles around her mid-brown eyes, as if sleep escaped her most nights. She was thinner than she should be, more tired than was healthy, and older than her age.  
Still, she smiled as she greeted Kageyama, as if they had known each other for years before.  
“You must be Kageyama Tobio. Pleased to meet you.”  
“Pleased to meet you,” he managed, feeling stupidly shy.

A figure suddenly popped up next to Mrs Hinata, with a head full of ginger cowlicks and a gaze full of suspicion.

“Natsu…” Hinata breathed, from his spot in the corner. It was the first thing he had said since they entered, and Kageyama had been feeling a little worried.  
He remembered the article again. This _had_ to be Hinata’s little sister.

“Mama,” the kid said, fixing Kageyama with a glare from her lofty height of under five feet, “who is the strange big man?”  
Mrs Hinata looked faintly embarrassed. “Natsu, honey, this is Kageyama Tobio. He was friends with your brother.”  
Natsu’s glare only deepened, and Kageyama had to physically restrain himself from glaring back in reflex. “I don’t like his face.”

Hinata was laughing in the corner. A blush was rising on Mrs Hinata’s cheekbones, and she hastily shooed Natsu away.  
“That’s not nice to say, Natsu! Now go take the money from the other boys for the flowers.”  
Throwing Kageyama one last scowl, the kid stomped off like a little orange dinosaur.

  
“Charming,” Kageyama muttered. Mrs Hinata sighed.  
“I don’t think she’s coping very well. Shouyou was just so _good_ with her. Playing jump rope all the time, helping her with her maths homework and colouring in. Although,” she added with a faint laugh, “she was actually better at that than _he_ was.”  
Kageyama, fighting a smirk, tried not to look at his angel,.

“She’s so… _suspicious_ of everyone. I think she’s worried someone will try to take Shouyou’s place. She told me the other day that she doesn’t want to know anybody new, she doesn’t want to make any more friends at school. She just wants her brother back.”  
A lump was rising in Kageyama’s throat, and he looked over at the small girl, mouthing off at Tanaka when he tried to fiddle with the rose display.  
“I…”  
“I’m sorry,” Mrs Hinata continued, waving her hand. “You must be feeling very uncomfortable right now. Anyway! You came all the way from Aoba Jousai, right? You must be hungry! Natsu and I were about to close up the shop and make some dinner. Did you want to join us?”  
Automatically, he glanced over at Hinata, who was completely expressionless.  
“I- yeah, that would be… nice.”

As she left to get the keys, Hinata sidled closer.  
“I’m sorry!” Kageyama hissed. “I panicked. Will you be okay? Do you want to just take off?”  
Hinata smiled with visible effort. “I don’t know when I’ll get to see them again. We should go with her. I’ll be fine.”

As it turned out, he was very, very wrong.

x

Natsu was not exactly thrilled when she heard that the big strange man was coming for dinner. Kageyama knew this because he could hear her arguing with her mother from his position in the living room, perched on the end of the patchy grey sofa and fiddling with his cup of water. 

Eventually, she appeared in the doorway, scowling. Her big brown eyes were squinched up in displeasure, and the wrinkle of her little snub nose was so Hinata-like that he almost did a double-take between them.  
“Mama says I have to say sorry that I was rude before.”  
“You shouldn’t say sorry if you don’t mean it,” Kageyama said without thinking, then blinked. “Erm…”

To his surprise, Natsu was looking at him a little less antagonistically than before. Eventually, she huffed out an inquisitive breath, shuffling a little closer.

  
“You’re more honest than most grown ups.”  
“Am I?” Kageyama said, for lack of a response to this strange creature.  
“Yeah. Most of them lie all the time. Telling me that Shou is “happier now,” in a “better place”. He liked being here! He liked playing with me. Where would he be happier than here?”

Without warning, Hinata stuck his mouth close to Kageyama’s ear, and his shoulders jumped in surprise.  
“Ask her to play with you,” he whispered, warm breath tickling Kageyama’s face, who wriggled slightly. The jolt in his spine was matched by a pang of nervousness this time.

“What?! – Erm.. What…” he said, realising that Natsu was looking at him strangely. “What did you usually play?”  
She jumped up and down, suddenly caught up in the excitement of remembering. All of her curls bounced in time. “All kinds of stuff! Jump rope and hide and seek and volleyball and-“  
“Volleyball?” Kageyama echoed. Hinata hid a smile behind one hand, unsuccessfully. “Are you any good?”

”Yeah!” Natsu puffed out her chest. Then, she deflated a little. “It hurts my wrists though. I cried the first time Shou tried to teach me.”  
Kageyama took a breath. “I’ll show you how to do it properly, if you want.”  
She stared at him, eyes narrowing. There was a long, pregnant pause.

Eventually, cautiously, she nodded.

x

She wasn’t bad, for a seven year old. Actually, she was rather good, despite her childlike lack of coordination and frequent bouts of frustration whenever the ball bounced away from her. Watching her jump up again and again to smack down his gentle tosses, he imagined Hinata in her place, soaring up to meet the toss as snowy wings sprouted from his back-

He remembered the dream he had the night before he met Hinata, and realised with a pang of bitter sadness that he would never see him play for real. He'd never tell Hinata, not in a million years, but he secretly thought he was right. That jumping  _was_ his special power, that he could fly up to meet the toss from nowhere. He could imagine tossing into thin air, a high toss meant for nobody, the faces of the opposition as the ball seemingly changed direction all on its own and spiralled towards their end of the court-

Hinata, landing from his supernaturally quick spike, bent low to the ground, feathers falling around him-

Grinning up at Kageyama, high-fiving him, the Karasuno team going mental beside them-

Shaking his head, he tried to stop picturing it. Somehow, it hurt to imagine a dream partnership that could only ever be that- a dream.

But this, Natsu, was the closest he could get to seeing Hinata play- a little fluffy-headed figure leaping up and down and demanding him to toss to her, clenching her fists again and again to receive a gentle serve, ignoring the bumpy pink swirls blossoming on her palms and forearms.

  
To Kageyama’s boundless surprise, he was actually kind of enjoying this. The thirty-minute practice game had re-awakened a fiery hunger, a bottomless thirst, a _craving_ (he couldn't describe it as anything else, really) to feel the ball lift from the curve of his palms, into the path of the blocker's strike. His mind was already whirring, calculating trajectory and speed and abilities of the spiker (he had to adjust quite a bit for the tiny Natsu), and it was like riding a bike. He'd never forgotten, not once.

Hinata's little sister spoiled the peace somewhat by asking endless questions and was forever nagging him to teach her more tricks, but being the volleyball dork that he was, he obliged again and again, until Mrs Hinata called them in forty minutes later.

“Natsu, honey! Wash your hands before dinner!”  
“But Mama,” she called back, looking genuinely sad (Kageyama felt a twinge of disbelief that this kid was enjoying playing with him), “I’m playing with Tobio.”  
 _Tobio????_  
“Natsu, don’t you want any food?”  
Pause.  
Natsu looked horrified at the thought of missing dinner.  
“I’m going, I’m going!”  
Running towards the house from their tiny backyard on her stumpy little legs, she called back to Kageyama.  
“Come on, Tobio! Mama’s made something special ‘coz we have a guest!”  
 _Tobio????_

Punting the volleyball off to one side, where it bounced away into the dense, unkempt bushels, he turned to Hinata, who was looking wistful but happier than he had all day.  
“Your sister’s not bad, for a ginger squirt that’s related to you.”  
Hinata smirked. “She’s cool, isn’t she… _Tobio_?”  
Scowling, Kageyama made a very rude gesture and strode towards the house, amid the sound of Hinata snorting with laughter.

x

Dinner went surprisingly well. Nobody cried, Kageyama managed to avoid spilling food on himself (as he was prone to do), and any potential awkward silences were filled effortlessly by Natsu, who apparently talked just as much as Hinata and at twice the volume.

Standing up, and thanking Mrs Hinata for the food, he felt a pang of contentment as he asked where the bathroom was.

Then, it all went to hell as he walked into their narrow hallway.

 

x

 

The photos on the walls broke his heart, every one.

 

Hinata, the brightest smile and hair and eyes in a cluster of friends. Hinata, gap-toothed and beaming in pride next to a brand new bike twice as big as he was. Hinata, gazing in wonder at his baby sister. A dozen Hinatas shone out of their simple wooden frames.

The thirteenth Hinata in the hallway was standing with his head down.

“I don’t want to look.”

Kageyama, briefly checking that they were alone, whispered back to him. “Why not? You’ve been doing so well this whole time.”

“This is too much. All these memories… I don’t want to remember. It hurts to remember.”  
Hinata turned to look at him, childlike in his desperation. “Please, Kageyama, I want to get out, I don’t want to look-“

He broke off, tears rising. “I can’t see how happy I was. Why would I want to look at something I can never have?”

Kageyama swallowed. As the words formed on his tongue, he knew he was going to regret the next sentence, but knowing and having the control to stop were such very different things.

“I do it every day.”

Confusion slid across the angel’s face.

“What do you-“

He broke off as a new voice floated down the hallway.

“I still talk to him.”  
Mrs Hinata had appeared from the kitchen, almost as soundless as Hinata. Her eyes were clear with a kind of infinite sadness, an incomprehension of the idea of living longer than her own son.

“I know it sounds insane. I think a part of each of us is insane, after losing our baby boy. Yet I like to think that, wherever he is, the words find him. I like to think he knows we haven’t forgotten him, that we still live with him even if he no longer lives with us.”

Hinata’s face was filled with yearning, staring wordless at his mother. His hands were curled into fists, shaking at his sides, and Kageyama felt a twinge of unease.

Still, he stepped towards Hinata's mother.  
“What would you say to him? If you could see him right now?”

She turned to Kageyama, suddenly smiling even as droplets clung to her eyelashes.

“I don’t have to tell him I love him. He knows that. But I would wish him peace. I’d tell him that we think of him everyday. And I would apologise.”

“For what?” Hinata whispered, forgetting she couldn’t hear him. 

Or maybe she could, in a way, for she tilted her head and continued, eyes closed.

“That we only learnt to cherish what we have, every moment of our lives, after losing him. We should have realised it sooner.”

There was a silence.

 

 

“We have to leave. Now.”  
A sudden and unprecedented fury had entered Hinata’s voice, hardening the tone beyond the usual birdlike chirp.

Kageyama jerked his head over to the angel and back to Mrs Hinata, who was looking confused. “Uhm…”

“Are you okay?” she asked, concerned, as Hinata was commanding him to leave.

“I…” Hinata was clenching his fists, head down, and he made up his mind. “I’m really sorry, but I have to get home. Thanks for the meal, I just…”  
Grabbing his coat from the living room, he raced for the door.

As he left, he heard Natsu start to call his name, and so he ran.

x

 

Hinata finally exploded in the trees, minutes from his house, and it was clear that hadn’t been fine, not at all.

“You made me _stay_ there! You made me hear my mother talk about what it’s like to _lose_ me! You made me stay, surrounded by photos of a life I was torn from, in some kind of sickening facsimile of my old home! I don’t know if you thought it would make me _happy_ , Kageyama, but you have no IDEA the agony of watching your family try to deal with your own death. It’s something out of a nightmare. And I will never, ever wake up.”

He paused for breath, choking a little on rage and sadness.

“And YOU! Tossing away your life like it means nothing! You’re a JERK, Kageyama, acting like you don’t want to live anymore when I would do ANYTHING to be alive again. Why don’t we swap, huh?! You can see what it’s like to be this way. Because believe me, Kageyama Tobio, nobody could EVER want this.”

“You think you want THIS?”

The reply came hot and fast. After being calm for so long, all the leftover emotions were congealing into a thick rage. Hinata opened his mouth, probably to call him more names, but Kageyama was screaming now and nothing could stop him.

“You think anyone wants THIS?! You’re in purgatory, Hinata, but I’m in my own goddamn hell. You think I pick up that razor for kicks? You think I wake up every day feeling tired and apathetic and done with everything because I _want_ to? You think I have a choice about living like this, any more than you had a choice about dying?  
I WANT to be happy. I WANT to be excited about things, to feel something other than a yawning abyss of sadness and grey. You were the first thing that I was almost happy about since time immemorial."

He couldn't stop now, it was all coming out, he couldn't stop himself, the words were right there, the long-kept confession already flying from his lips-

"And isn’t it sad? That I’m in love with you, but _almost_ happy is the closest I’ll ever get? Doesn’t it just break your dead fucking heart, Hinata Shouyou?!”

 

He turned around, fell to his knees in the dirt. Dug his nails into the ground and screamed, screamed to the trees and the sky and the angel staring wordless behind him.


	8. We're Shocking But We're Nothing

 

This time, the silence lasted for five days.

Kageyama didn’t speak to him, didn’t touch him, didn’t even _look_ at his guardian angel for fear of slapping him or throwing up, both of which were equally likely.  
He felt an almost constant twist of nausea, the kind he got whenever he went on a rollercoaster.  
A rollercoaster that he couldn’t get off.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, the blurry thought arose that he could kind of see where Hinata was coming from.  
He, Kageyama, seemed to be wasting his life. Hinata had no life to waste. It made sense for him to be jealous and lash out.

Or so the rational part of his brain argued. However, as with most people, the rational part of his brain was fighting a losing battle against the large and rather noisy irrational part.

The irrational part, on the other hand, was telling Kageyama that Hinata could go do something very rude and probably physically impossible to himself, because Kageyama wasn’t wasting his life so much as it was being wasted _for_ him, by a monster that he couldn’t beat and never chose to face.

He knew Hinata wouldn’t understand. It was impossible to understand this. As with many diseases, you cannot possibly know what it’s like unless you _know_ what it’s _like_.

But blaming him for it?  
Unforgivable.

 

 

_Or was Hinata right?_

No. He was very, very wrong.

_Or was he?_

 

 

 

Irrational Kageyama mused this for hours. Then musing turned to worrying, to agonising, to obsessing, until it all became too much to handle and he ran home from school again, gasping for breath through the twin knives in his sides.

He paused briefly at his doorway, shaking fingers digging into the chipped wooden frame. It felt like he was looking down from a great height, about to throw himself off the same old bridge and crash into the water again.

And this time, nobody was going to stop him from falling.

 

Heaving himself upright, Kageyama headed straight for the razor in his drawer, fingers twitching to feel the silver and rust he had left behind so many weeks ago-

 

Until he was bodily tackled from behind by a blur of light.

 

“Hinata!” he roared, struggling in the angel’s grasp. “Get the fuck off me!”  
The angel held fast, straddling him and pinning his wrists to the floor. If it had been any other week, before their fight, Kageyama would have been desperately embarrassed/delighted about how very sexual the whole situation was.  
Any other week but that one.

 

“Hinata,” he said, actually trying to bend his leg far enough to knee him in the back, “you lost the right to protect me from myself when you blamed me for my own depression. Now GET. OFF.”  
“No!” Hinata shouted back, right in his face. “I won’t let you go back to doing that, I have to-“

His head suddenly lurched forward, as Kageyama writhed like a startled salmon under him, and their mouths banged together-

  
Kageyama’s eyes were wide open in shock, he was about to push the angel off him when he saw-

  
Hinata’s eyes were closed.

  
He was _kissing_ him.

 

His lips were thin but incredibly soft, and the initial pain of their teeth clacking together faded behind the fuzzy dreamlike state that took over Kageyama’s mind.  
He was kissing Hinata. Hinata was kissing him.  
Hinata was-

Crying?

Confused by the sudden droplets on his cheekbones, Kageyama tried to lean his head back, but he was already lying down and succeeded only in thunking his head against the floor.  
He _mmph_ ed in pain, and Hinata jerked back.  
The angel was still squarely on top of Kageyama, who was trying his utmost to control the heat coiling in his lower belly and thinking about how unfair it was that Hinata could blame him one moment, kiss him the next, and then cry about both.

“I’m sorry,” Hinata was whispering over and over, a seemingly endless stream of tears threading down his cheeks and dropping onto Kageyama’s jacket.  
The two stared at each other, before Hinata’s mouth twitched and he started full-out sobbing.  
Still furious, and now a little turned on, Kageyama just lay there in horror.  
“I’m s-sorry!” Hinata was crying so hard he was almost unintelligible. “I said all those mean things to you, and they’re not even _true_ , I was just so jealous that you’re alive and can play with my little sister and talk to my mother and I have to _stand_ there and _watch_. I’m so sorry I took it out on you, Kageyama, none of this is your fault, you try-“  
“No, I don’t.”  
Hinata hiccoughed. “W-what?”  
“I don’t try.” Kageyama said the words without even a hint of hesitation. “Or at least I didn’t, before I met you.”  
The angel was staring at him in astonishment, and he felt the courage to continue.

Rational Kageyama was dusting himself off and taking control again, and he felt the words form, truer than light, on his tongue.

“I didn’t try to get better because I didn’t really know _how_. It just felt like I was so stuck, so lost in my own terrible world, just treading water until I met you. It wasn’t my _fault_ , but you’re right. I didn’t try to live better. And I know how that looks to someone who would give anything to live at all.

Hinata, I don’t know what it’s like to be dead. But if it sucks even more than being alive, then I don’t blame you for being upset. Even if it is with me.”

The old Kageyama would have thrown Hinata bodily out of the room, he knew that. He wouldn’t have mustered a single word in Hinata’s defence.  
Yet somehow among all the screaming and crying, he felt a calm rush into him again. It was a strange sort of mood whiplash, brought on by the utter sincerity of the angel sobbing in front of him. Hinata knew he was wrong. Kageyama knew how he got there.  
It was a surety that they would get through this. He had his angel, and they would get through this.

His angel, who had _kissed_ him fifteen seconds ago.  
  


“I’m not sorry for kissing you,” Hinata whispered, as if he read Kageyama’s mind. “I’ve wanted to do that ever since you threatened to have me arrested.”  
Kageyama’s lips twitched, remembering the night he met Hinata, and then the angel caught them in another kiss.

 

x

 

 

The sixth day, he remembered what it was like to be happy.  
He felt the feeling return, cautiously peeking out from the corner of his mind, as he ditched school to stay home and kiss his angel.

(At this point, he was desperately hoping that Hinata was real, because skipping school to make out with an imaginary friend was the saddest thing he’d ever heard of anyone doing, ever.)

 

It was lukewarm happiness, weak and diluted by disbelief, but it was there, and it strengthened all afternoon until his veins were thrumming as they lay in bed together by the window, watching the colours change on the white apartment walls as the sun melted into the horizon behind them.

He never wanted to get up. He just wanted to lie there forever, lost in the smell and taste and light of Hinata Shouyou, but he could hear his mother coming down the hallway and the idea of her seeing him tonguing thin air did not exactly appeal to him.

Perched on the bed, he smiled at her as she came in. She looked a little shocked, but to her credit recovered quickly and smiled back.  
She had beautiful smile, he realised.

“Mum,” he said, fiddling with his sleeve. He was still feeling buzzy and twitchy from the amazement of finally kissing Hinata, and he wondered if she could tell.  
She hesitantly sat next to him on the bed, looking like she was afraid he’d bite her.

Glancing up, he could see his angel cross-legged by the wardrobe, watching him with those hazelnut eyes. They’d talked about this all day, planning and theorising in between kisses.

He knew he had to do this.  
He knew he had to tell her.

_(It’s less scary than teaching my little sister volleyball, isn’t it?)_

So he opened his mouth, and spoke.

“I want to change schools. I want to move to Karasuno. I can’t take it here anymore, you know that.”  
“I do,” she whispered, eyes glassy.  
“Erm… so I was thinking,” he continued, a little surprised by her lack of opposition but soldiering on with their plan, “that maybe I should get back in touch with Dad. See if I could stay with him during the week.”  
The sentence came seemingly of its own accord, and instantly he wanted to snatch it back, but his mother didn’t immediately shoot it down. He loved her for that.

Sighing, she let her hair out of its strict ponytail. It fell, black and shining, around her shoulders.  
“Your father is a busy man, Tobio. He would be away an awful lot.”  
“I know,” he said, “I remember.”

She nodded.  
“Well, if you really want this, and it would make you happy…”

Then, her lips actually trembled.  
“I’d miss you,” she said, like a child.

His heart felt tight.

“I’d come home at weekends. And we don’t even know if Dad would say yes. He hasn’t seen me in years.”  
“We can try,” she said, with an almost Hinata-like air of determination. “It’s the least he can do for his own flesh and blood. I’ll go call him right now.”  
With that, she left the room with the unstoppable air of a mother on a mission.

As she shut the door behind her, Kageyama huffed out a breath and lay back on the bed. Fingers suddenly wormed through his dark hair, and Hinata appeared above him, smiling softer than usual.  
“I’m proud of you,” he said, kissing Kageyama’s forehead. Then he squirmed. “Man, I keep feeling really embarrassed every time I do that, like you’re gonna punch me or something.”  
“Why the hell are _you_ embarrassed? I’m the one that’s in love with a dead guy!”  
Hinata laughed, light and loud at the same time, and lay down next to him. “When you yelled that you loved me, I couldn’t believe it. I thought you were lying to guilt-trip me.”  
“Hinata,” Kageyama said, patiently. “That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever come up with. Which is really saying something.”  
Hinata flicked him on the nose. “I … can’t believe that after weeks of annoying you and five days of ignoring you, I just spent a whole twelve hours kissing you.”  
“Twelve hours, huh? It felt like forever.”  
“It felt like no time at all.”

Kageyama flipped over and just stared at him. He felt lost in this, and he loved it. It was like fire and lightening coursing through his body every time Hinata touched him, every time they laced their fingers together.

“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe how much I feel.”

Instantly, he felt stupid, but Hinata was looking thoughtful.

“I think that when we’re young, what we feel takes up our whole world.”

He looked as embarrassed as Kageyama, but he nosed at him, getting him to elaborate.

  
“We get lost in our own sadness and loneliness and desire.”  
“That’s what I was lost in,” Kageyama said softly, “before you came in.”  
“Right. Maybe I’m just a reminder that there is something bigger, something more. Like that feeling you get when you play volleyball, or look at the stars, or listen to a great piece of music. Maybe you just needed a reminder. A reminder that this, your sadness, isn’t all there is. So here I am.”  
“Here you are,” Kageyama repeated, loving him.  
It was quiet for a long time. Kageyama could hear his mother murmuring on the phone, muffled through the door.  
Feeling peaceful and reckless, he kissed Hinata again, pressing their whole bodies together, from toes to lips.  
“I wish this was all there is,” he whispered through the kiss.  
“You wish what was all there is?” Hinata mouthed back, fingers stroking through Kageyama’s hair again.  
“Us,” he breathed.

x

 

They lay like that for hours, kissing and more than kissing and less than kissing and back again, until Kageyama finally fell asleep, lost in the warmth and coldness of Hinata Shouyou.

 

When he woke up, there were feathers everywhere, and Hinata was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oooh, and you thought it was going to be happy ever after.


	9. Losing It

 

Kageyama had wished Hinata would fuck off many times.

Actually, he had _told_ him to fuck off many times.

 

He had listened to people talk about what it was like to live without Hinata, and he had seen the loss in their faces, the ache and catch in their voices. 

He had felt pity for them, sympathy even. It had to be hard to lose a loved one. He didn't really count his father, who had always treated the position as more of a job title than an acknowledgement of any sort of familiar affection he might hold for his son. 

So yes, he had seen the face of love lost. He knew what it looked like, how it was meant to feel. 

 

However, nothing had prepared him for the horrific, gut-wrenching emptiness of losing Hinata Shouyou.

 

x

 

At first, he thought, losing your guardian angel was like losing a wallet or a set of keys, only a hundred million times worse.

You pat your pocket, look around in a state of confusion for wherever you had them last.  
Then confusion turns to panic, coupled with disbelief.

(You can’t have lost them. They were right there, and they were too important to lose.  
They have to be somewhere.  
But  _where?)_

Then, anger and frustration takes over as you realise what you have done.

(What kind of idiot loses their keys, their wallet? What kind of idiot loses their guardian angel? You should have taken better care of them, made sure to put them away properly. Held them one last time.)

And finally, acceptance –  
that they were lost, somewhere in the world, and they were never coming back.

 

Kageyama had passed almost all those stages.

He had woken up, alone and covered in feathers, and sleepily looked around for his angel.  
He had started panicking around the time that he realised the room was devoid of its usual supernatural light source.  
 

(Had Hinata gotten himself locked in a cupboard somewhere?)

(He was pretty sure angels couldn’t get locked in cupboards, but if anyone could do it, Hinata could.)

 

 

Disbelief was the next and second hardest. Comprehension was dawning, slow and creeping in like a fog through his mind, but he pushed it frantically back.

There was no way Hinata could be gone. They had just started to fall in love. There was no way the universe could make such a dick move as to give him the love of his life, for twenty-four hours, and then take them away.

 

Then, anger and frustration hit.

How could Hinata have disappeared? How could Kageyama not have said “I love you,” even once?

(He had said it, with his eyes and his hands and his smile. They had said many things, lying there silently.)

He punched his wall that Thursday, and his mother rushed in to find him sitting on the bed, fist limp at his side.  
She took him to hospital. He had bruised knuckles.  
Nobody was there to heal them that day.

 

Oh, he had passed through all those emotions. He’d had them again and again, mixing in amongst themselves and blurring like colours on a palette. Yet he hadn’t cried yet, as if the emptiness inside extended to his tear ducts.

Then he found the only problem with his wallet/angel theory.  
The acceptance.

Kageyama felt like he was about a hundred years off that stage, because after a week the idea of living without Hinata still made him want to simultaneously throw up and punch the wall again (which would be hard to pull off).

He just couldn’t accept it. He kept looking over his shoulder, waiting for the angel to burst into his vision and whisper in his ear. Waiting for the light, he was living in his peripherals, always looking back.

x

 

The second week, he was still lying in bed at 3pm on a Wednesday. His mother had tried making him go back to either Aoba Jousai or Karasuno, and after threatening to drag him to a therapist, had apparently given up and was slipping quietly back into her old routine of pretending nothing was wrong.

Alone, he felt the loss rise up in him. It was a void like nothing else, a vast emptiness that made him sick to his stomach.  
He made for the razor again.

 

But on the way up from the bed, he stumbled, and lurched forward onto the harsh sandy carpet-

_Tackled by a blur of light-_

Flipping over, he lay dazed on his back

_Hinata above him, eyes blazing and hands digging into his wrists-_

He choked out a breath, drowning in the sudden memories

_\- lips pressed together, hands gripping hands, warmth through his whole body-_

He didn’t want to remember but it was so real that he couldn’t stop himself

_\- light and skin and warmth and Hinata was everywhere, all he could see were those hazelnut eyes-_

 

Gasping, he sat up. He blinked.

He saw the empty room for what it was.  
Empty.

 

There was no light by his shoulder. Hinata had really gone.

 

Kageyama’s mother came home forty minutes later to find her son curled in the foetal position, a mess of snot and tears and broken love for an angel that he now realised was never coming back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> losing somebody sucks.  
> the end.


	10. A Team In Grief

_One Month Later_

 

As he woke up, it was there.  
The feeling suffused him like a blanket, hung around him and in him. It was deep inside his chest and hanging patiently at the corner of his vision.  
It was a heavy loneliness. It was a lukewarm isolation. It was a blue-grey emptiness.

He looked to the ceiling and wondered why he had to wake up.

 

Then, someone buzzed the door.

x

 

The Karasuno team all piled into the living room, faces ranging from curious (Nishinoya), to sympathetic (Sugawara), to downright awkward (Tanaka and everyone else).  
Kageyama positioned himself with his back to the corner of a room, like a cat. He didn’t really know why he let them in in the first place, but something about the commanding tone of Daichi’s voice and the gently beseeching one of Sugawara’s had made it difficult to say no.

Here they were, all cramped onto the couches and looking at him expectantly.

“Um,” he said, not really caring how rude it sounded anymore (who was going to chastise him, anyway?). “Why are you here?”

Daichi stood up, and although he was around Kageyama’s height, his stony eyes seemed to grant him an extra few inches.  
“You never contacted us. We figured something had gone wrong, so we called your house, and your mother answered…”  
He trailed off, not wanting to finish his sentence. He didn’t have to.  
Kageyama could picture it now, his mother blathering on about her son barricading himself in his room and losing himself in crying jags that lasted hours. They were about to tell him that it was a phase, that it would get better, that whatever went wrong would soon be right…

Except, they didn’t.

In the end, it was Noya who stepped forward to join Daichi.

“I didn’t play for a week after Hinata died. I couldn’t handle it. But then, I thought about how angry he would get, knowing my absence would be his fault, and I had to get on the court again.”

Kageyama was dead silent, staring at the tiny libero. He hadn’t thought they had come to say this. As far as they knew, Hinata had been dead for months. How would they know he had only just lost him? How would they know it was only just sinking in?

Suga was watching him.

Suddenly Kageyama knew.  

For whatever reason, they had guessed what was wrong (or as close as they could), and so they had come to offer what little they had to a stranger, joined as they were by a love for volleyball and a loss that none of them had seen coming.

Asahi rose to his considerable height, placing one hand on Noya’s shoulder.  
“He wrote me a card once, for my birthday. His writing is so bad that I had to get Natsu to read it for me, but now I know the words off by heart.” He coughed, wiping his eyes surreptitiously, and everyone pretended not to notice.

“I have his movie that he leant to me,” Tanaka offered, “and I just can’t bring myself to give it back to his family. It’s not even a good movie, it’s full of fast cars and shitty jokes and pretty girls, and way too many explosions, although actually that makes it pretty fantastic and I was lying before, it’s totally my favourite movie too…” he broke off, catching Daichi clearing his throat at him, “….anyway, it’s just so Hinata that I can’t give it back. It’s all I have.”

Suga was the last to rise up, and he did so slowly. “We all miss him. We all cling to the pieces he left behind. There’s no right way of dealing with it, but we all have to try until we find a way to live with losing our Hinata.”

There was a long and painful pause, in which the team of fully-grown males before him were all very obviously trying not to cry.

“His mother talks to him,” Kageyama whispered, the words forcing their way throught the lump in his throat, “but I just can’t. It’s different when I know he won’t reply anymore.”

“Maybe not,” Suga said, with a sad smile. “But don’t you still have things to tell him?”

x

The sentence echoed round his head after the team left, still urging him to come and play.

“Natsu’s been coming to our practices, looking for you!”  
“Kid, you have skills, don’t waste them at Aoba Jousai!”  
“We have two transfers from your school, too!” Noya had said, face squinched up as he tried to remember their names. “Some jerky blonde guy and a freckly kid.”

Kageyama thought he recognised the description, but couldn’t quite remember why.

“Yeah, they moved ‘cause, as the blonde put it, _that Oikawa guy is a real dick when his turnip-head boyfriend’s not there to keep him in line_. Man, who knew Oikawa was gay? His fanclub is going to take a real hit after this.”  
“Or gain some new members,” Tanaka laughed. “I always knew it! No straight person would ever style their hair that way.”  
“How would you know? You have no hair!”  
“At least I can still ride all the rollercoasters without gelling it up!”

Kageyama, a little dazed, waved them off, bickering out the door.

So he was dating Iwaizumi all along. Huh.

He knew how he would have felt about this before. But how could he ever go back to crushing on a bimbo like Oikawa when he’d loved someone as fiercely as he loved Hinata?

How could he go back to playing?

How could he go back to see Natsu, when he was essentially going to be staring at a carbon copy of his dead angel?

He collapsed onto the couch, head buzzing. It felt like he had too much to deal with, too much to think about.

 

_Don’t you still have things to tell him?_

 

He couldn’t open his mouth and speak to the dead, lightless air. He couldn’t pretend that Hinata was listening anymore.

And then, he picked up a pen to add to the shopping list, and the words forced themselves out of his heart onto the paper.

 

_Dear Idiot,_

_Please come back. I can’t do this without you. Your family can’t do this without you._  
 _It hurts too much._

_Kageyama._

_P.S Oikawa is gay. So there’s that._  
 _But don’t worry, my heart will always belong to a shiny dead guy with orange hair._

_…_

_that’s you by the way. come back._  
 _please._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oooh, chapter one references.  
> booyah.


	11. Childlike

_Two Months Later_

_-Dear Idiot,_

_Your mum called again today. Natsu’s been asking about me, wanting me to teach her more volleyball. Guess the big strange man made quite the impression on your little sister._

_I can’t go and see her. How can I?_  
 _How can I go and see someone who’s just like you?_

_A tiny bit of love, and a whole lot of resentment for leaving me behind,_  
 _Kageyama.-_

 

 

Frowning, he remembered the voice message. Mrs Hinata had sounded soft, cautious, like Kageyama was a kitten that she was going to scare away.  
He knew Hinata would have laughed at this, at everyone treating him like a mental case. But the truth was, he _was_ scared. Terrified, actually, of looking into the little girl’s eyes and seeing his dead angel.

Writing it down, he could see the fear in the ink, and he hated it.

 

And yet, Suga had been right. Putting it all down sorted the chaos in his head, channelled it into the simplicity of black ink on white paper. The scrawls and the crossing-outs and the furious scribbles where he had nothing to say except pain and anger and _FUCK YOU, HINATA_

(Which had been yesterday's letter, a bad day again, just  a long line of _FUCK YOU_ s with a token  _Yours Sincerely, Kageyama_ at the end)

Amid all of that, the words were there. The emotion fed out of his mind and onto the paper, and he always felt a little exhausted at the end, somehow.

 

He'd started a little routine. Going away, coming back, reading his own anguished words (his handwriting was so appalling that sometimes he could only read it by memory of what he'd written), and closing his eyes.

Stepping outside of himself.

And today, as if Hinata were writing the reply in his mind, he wrote down the next sentence.

 

_Go and see her, you pussy._

 

And that was how he came to be standing at the door of the Hinata residence again, ringing the doorbell until he was rushed by a tiny figure in a purple dress that clashed magnificently with their orange curls.

“Hey, brat. Wanna play some volleyball?”

 

x

 

He was sitting outside with Natsu, both panting a little from their latest tutorial. She was getting scarily good, and he was torn between being immensely proud of them both and being a little worried that she was going to surpass him at the age of seven.

“You know,” he said, not sure where the words were coming from, “your brother’s old team want me to play for them.”  
She looked at him, eyes shining in the moonlight. “Karasuno? Are you going to do it?”

Good question.

  
He looked down. “I.. don’t know if I can.”  
She wrinkled her nose. “But why? I want to play for them too! We can play together!”  
He almost laughed, but for some reason the thought brought forth some infinite and nameless sadness.  
“I can’t. It makes me think about him too much.”

Natsu nodded seriously, rolling the ball absent-mindedly over her legs. “I know. I didn’t play jump rope for days, too, after Mum told me he was gone. But then someone at school asked me to join in, and I said that it’s what Shou and I did together, so I can’t do it anymore, and they said that he’d still be dead whether or not I played. So I jumped in.”  
Kageyama sucked in his breath. Natsu had, with classic childish wisdom, hit the nail on the head. Sure, it was a crude and rather depressing way of putting it, but it was true.  
“But doesn’t it make you sad?” he asked, unable to believe he was getting therapy from an elementary school kid.  
Natsu chewed her lip in a Hinata-ish way. He guessed it was a family habit.  
“Not really. I remember him, but it’s not a bad thing. People forget that it’s possible to remember people in a nice way and not in a sad way.  
And anyway, whether I play jump rope or not, it won’t bring him back to me. So I may as well be happy and play. Shou liked it when I was happy.”

This kid was kind of a genius. Kageyama couldn’t believe she was related to _Hinata._

Then, she fell up the steps when getting to her feet, and he could see the resemblance all over again.

“Ouch! Come on, Tobio! I want to be as good as you, and we'll both play for Karasuno, and be Olympians, and win gold medals, and that means we have to practice lots together! Okay?!”

She held out her hand, very seriously, and he tried not to smile as he shook it.

“Okay.”

 

 

_-Dear Bane of My Existence,_

_Your kid sister is better than me at volleyball. Should I be worried?_

_She also happens to be the smartest kid on the block. I think maybe you were adopted, or dropped on your head as a child. No offence._

_She told me it doesn’t matter what I do, you’re not coming back. So I should try to be happy, else I may as well be dead along with you._

_Somehow I think you’d kill me if I turned up dead one day. At least one of us should make it to the Olympics._

_Although I think Natsu might get there first._

_Irritatedly yours,_

_Kageyama Tobio. -_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somebody PLEASE draw Natsu interacting with Kageyama. Please.   
> Seriously it's my greatest headcanon that every kid except Natsu hates him


	12. Time, Time, Time (Five Out Of Hundreds)

Three Months Later

 

_Dumbass Hinata,_

_The school called again, and I finally did it. I moved._

_Dad said no, not that surprises any of us._ _But then your mum called, and said Natsu really wants her Tobio-chan (?!) to come around more. This kid does not quit._

_Anyway, I think I’m going to be staying with them in the week, then home at weekends._

_Natsu’s taking your room, don’t worry. I won’t disturb any of your piles of crap (although I guess you were too busy dying to clean your room)._

_I'm gonna be honest here. Every time I walk down that hallway, I think of you, how we met and just talked about volleyball all day, and our massive fight, and how I much I wanted to punch you in your stupid pretty face, and then how I ended up kissing your stupid pretty face instead, and then how you up and left me, and then it just comes full circle right back again to thinking about you._

_Before I said I had two hobbies; sleeping, and milk boxes._ _Now I guess, I have three; sleeping, milk boxes, and thinking about you._

_Oh, and volleyball. Although that kind of clashes with the sleeping and milk boxes._

_Regretfully but eternally yours,_

_Kageyama Tobio-_

x

 Three Months and Twenty-Two Days Later

 

_-Hinata Shouyou, Angel Extraordinaire,_

_Today, I played my first game as the substitute setter for Karasuno._   
_It was weird, I was so worried about it being junior high all over again, that I was going to be the jerk king of the court and end up hating everyone._   
_But when the ball touched my hands, it was like I heard your voice in my head. The best piece of advice you ever gave me;_

_“Don’t play like an asshole, Kageyama.”_

_We won, so I guess I should thank you._

_It was against this weird ass team with some kind of cat name, and apparently you knew a kid there, some blonde that Tanaka nicknamed "pudding-kun", which is accurate if not particularly flattering. He asked me about "Shouyou", and it took me a long time to realise that was you. The only names I usually refer to you by in my head are "idiot Hinata," "dumbass Hinata," and "my walking lamp that never shuts up"._

_Then his friend, some other dude with weird black flicky hair, came by and said he remembered "chibi-chan". I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that's you._

_Guess you made quite the impression on all of us, huh? We all kinda took you for granted_ _._

_If we'd met, before you became a holy jerkface (when you were just a regular jerkface instead), would I have taken you for granted? Would I have even said I love you?_

_Or would I just love you from afar, orbit you like your own little unwilling moon, always aware of where you are and what you're doing? Focus on how much you piss me off, because it's easier than accepting how desperately in love with you I am?_

_This is one of those times that I wish I had a time machine, so I could go back and force myself to meet you. Or maybe it's better, to not have known you alive. It would be harder that way. We would have actually had a chance._

_I told Tanaka that, and he said all we have to do is find a DeLorean car and hit 88 miles per hour, but I don't see how that would help. Maybe it's a reference._

_I know you'd get it, and probably call me a dumbass for not knowing. Well, you're the dumbass, dumbass, for dying and leaving me alone._

_As you can see, I have totally forgiven you for ditching me._

_Anyway, thanks for the advice, and screw you for still being gone._

_Love and begrudging gratitude,_   
_Tobio Kageyama-_

 

 

x

One Year Later

 

_-Hinata Shouyou,_

_It’s weird that the seniors are gone. I used to feel like a spare part, but then I practiced with them so often that it was like I had been there all along. Now, I’m back to square one._   
_Except I guess this time I’m not starting alone. Tanaka and Noya, the other second-years, and the guys from my old school are with me, and we have to start training up the newbies._   
_None of them are a patch on Natsu, though. I wish elementary schoolers could play high school volleyball._

_I can't believe that you've been gone for a year now. I've just realised that you've now been gone for more time than you were with me._

_Is it weird, to fall for someone so hard in such a short space of time? To become so emotionally invested in a matter of months, weeks even?_

_Is it weird to be still thinking about them one year later? To still have trouble breathing when you remember they're gone?_

_I used to live for dreaming, when I could see you again. I'd wake up in the morning, and there would be this blissful second where I forgot you weren't there. That moment of forgetting was the highlight of my day._

_Then I'd open my eyes, and remember._

 

_Now I've lost that, and I always remember. Now the things I'm forgetting are the parts of you that I can't see every day in your hallway photos._

_The pitch of your voice. The tone of your laugh. How you smelled.  
How you kissed._

_I don't want to forget those things, so come back before I do, okay?_

_Loving you still,_

_Kageyama Tobio-_

 

x

 Eighteen Months Later

_-Hinata,_

_We won the inter-high spring trophy. The newbies did so well, I was proud of them. They call me “Captain Tobio” because apparently I boss them around too much. It’s annoying, they used to respect me until Natsu came around and told them all I watch Adventure Time with her every Saturday morning._

_After the game, the seniors bought us all pork buns and we just talked for hours._   
_About you, actually._

_Did you hear any of it?_

_I didn’t tell them I still write to you. But Suga found one of my letters, and he said I should write down everything._   
_Everything about how we met, and how we fell in love._

_(I pretended we were dating before, don't worry. I'll take our secret to the grave, and I guess you already have. Hah hah.)_

_I’m going to have to pass it off as fiction if I write down our real story, or never show it to anyone ever, but I guess I could try. I think you’d like me writing about you, egoist that you are._

_Love,_

_Kageyama-_

 

x

Two Years Later

_-Shouyou,_

_Jeez, it feels weird calling you that, but I guess if i'm never going to do it in real life I may as well write it in a letter._

_Anyway. Today, I had to run straight from graduation to Natsu’s volleyball game. I coached the whole damn thing in my cap and gown._

_Apparently I embarrassed Natsu so much that she went around telling everybody I wasn’t actually related to her._

_( I think somewhere along the line we had both forgotten that it was the truth.)_

_She was the one who actually suggested a degree in fitness education. Like I said, your sister is a secret genius._

_I’m kinda nervous, going off to college, but don’t worry, I’ll still write. Letters to you, and continuing the story of how we were._   
_It hurts to remember, but it’s like Natsu said. You can remember someone in a nice way, too._

_So I promise._   
_I’ll take you with me, wherever I go._

_Love,_

_Tobio.-_


	13. Letters To An Angel

_Five Years Later._

 

“Tobio, where the hell are you?”

Scowling into the phone, he hurried along towards the station, the sea of people opening up before him as if by magic (a frowning Kageyama was quite an intimidating Kageyama).  
“Natsu, what did I tell you about swearing?”  
He winced as she sighed into the other end of the phone, making the speaker crackle and whine.  
“Sorry, _Dad_. What did I tell you about getting here on time?”  
He bit back a laugh. Checkmate.  
“I’m on my way now. Want me to bring you food?”  
He could almost see her smiling, probably lying outside in the grass and bouncing a volleyball on her knees. It was odd, how this kid was a thousand miles away and yet he still knew her like the back of his hand.  
“Fine. Something healthy, though!”  
He snorted. “Natsu, don’t worry. Olympians-in-training can still eat Pocky.”  
There was a pause.  
“Strawberry pocky?”  
He was grinning as he hung up. Then, he winced, as the sunlight stabbed his eyes and heated up his black jumper in an instant. He would be boiling by noon.  
“Shit, it’s bright today,” he muttered to himself.

“Sorry about that.”

His double take was probably comical. Natsu definitely would have laughed.

But there was nothing funny about turning around and coming face-to-holy-face with his ex-guardian angel.

 

x

 

It was like everything inside him screeched to a halt.

They stood there for the longest time, commuters rushing around them (and through Hinata, which was extremely odd; Kageyama had forgotten he was the only one who could touch him).

Fiddling with his zipper, Hinata was the first to speak, as always.  
“Uh… hey.”  
Kageyama just looked at him.  
“Soooo….. how’ve you been?”  
“Pretty good, actually.” Kageyama said, with difficulty. He was a little torn between kissing Hinata and interrogating him. “And you?”  
Hinata made a face. “Still dead.”

Kageyama actually laughed, and the sound snapped the bubble of disbelief and awkwardness surrounding them.  
“Wanna go for a walk?”

 

x

“Natsu sounded pretty devastated that her strawberry pocky would be delayed, but I think she’ll forgive me.”  
“Really?” Hinata was saying, as they sat under the oak trees. The dappled light under the shade contrasted oddly with his aura, and Kageyama was resisting the urge to shade his eyes.  
“Yeah. I mean, she forgave me for writing stories about kissing you, so-“

In a flash, Hinata’s eyebrows rose almost to his scruffy hairline.

“You wrote _what_ about me?”

 

At first, Kageyama had felt embarrassed about admitting this to Hinata, but then he realised there was little point in being awkward around a dead guy.

  
“I wrote about us, actually. It’s a novel-ish  kind of thing… The university press want to publish it,” he said with a degree of pride. “Everyone just thinks it’s metaphoric and quirky.”  
“Riiiiiight…” Hinata said, slowly. “So they don’t secretly think you’re a creep who makes out with dead teenagers?”  
”No! They think it’s fiction, dumbass! _Metaphoric and quirky_ , like I said!”

He couldn’t believe how Hinata could still piss him off like nothing else. He hadn’t missed _that_ in five years.

Actually, that was a big lie and he knew it. He had missed everything about this.

“Doesn’t it… hurt?” Hinata said, with the air of one trying to be delicate and having no idea how to go about it. “I mean, I was gone for a long time. Places to go, people to guard. Doesn’t it hurt to remember?”

“No, it doesn’t. It helps.”

Hinata tossed an acorn up and down with slim fingers, thinking. He still looked the same, and Kageyama wondered if angels aged. Maybe he’d see next time.

Yet he had a feeling that he wouldn’t - that this was the last time he’d ever see Hinata.

To his surprise, the thought wasn’t crushing him. It just felt like the truth.

 

“So,” Hinata said, finally. “You write. You coach. And you’re going to be a…”  
“P.E teacher,” Kageyama said, and Hinata choked on his own spit.

“You’re going to be a – BWAHAHAHAHA!”

“SHUT UP!” Kageyama roared, amid waves of Hinata’s cackly laughter. “Natsu said I would be good at teaching kids, and she’s a kid, so she’d know!”  
“Kageyama... a teacher…” Hinata was actually wiping his eyes, now laughing even harder amid Kageyama’s flawless logic. “Oh Kageyama-sensei, that’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.”  
“I’ve grown since you left, okay?! A lot has changed in five years,” Kageyama snapped back, and Hinata fell silent.

 

“I didn’t know I was going to leave,” he said, quietly. “I didn’t want to. I just woke up and your room was gone. Really, I don’t even know how I can come back now. This angel thing is kind of a mystery to me,” he admitted, now shelling the acorn.  
Kageyama put one hand over it, covering Hinata’s fingers. “It’s okay. I moved on.” He took a breath. “I realised that I can’t wait for an angel forever. I have to live my own life first.”  
Tears were sparkling in Hinata’s eyes.

“I’m glad,” he said, and he did look genuinely happy, smiling at Kageyama with droplets glossing his cheeks and eyelids.

He also looked beautiful. In the past, Kageyama would have scoffed at anyone calling this scruffy midget by such a name. Yet now, gazing at how his skin and hair and eyes glowed in the mid-morning sunlight, it was the only adjective that fit.

“I wrote about that smile,” Kageyama said, just as quietly. “All the time. Most of my letters, in the year after you left.”  
“You wrote me letters?” the angel repeated, confused.  
Kageyama fished in his backpack, silently handing Hinata the notepad in response.  
It was the paper that he had carried around with him every day since leaving Aoba Jousai, and although the first letter was a mess of blurry ink and food stains, the last few were perfectly legible.  
Hinata was reading them, mouthing the words like a little kid, and the expression on his face was like nothing Kageyama had ever seen before.  
“Wow,” he said, eventually. “That’s a lot of letters.”  
“I love you a lot, though,” Kageyama said, bluntly.

Hinata blinked at him. “Don’t you mean loved?”

“No.”

Hinata’s hand tightened on his, and this was what he had been waiting for. Full circle.

“I love you a lot, too.”

They had said everything, aloud this time, and Kageyama felt like the last blot of empty space had been filled inside him. He felt complete, lying there one last time with his angel burning beside him in the cool shade.

“So, Tobio,” Hinata said a little shyly, and Kageyama knew how he was meant to reply.  
“Yes, Shouyou?”  
“Tell me about this book of yours.” He tilted his head slightly, rustling the leaves, and looked at Kageyama like he was trying to imprint him in his vision forever. “What’s it called?”  
Kageyama smiled.

“ _Letters to an Angel_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wheyheeeey finally done.
> 
> I'm hoping that you guys will describe this as "bittersweet" and not "a total cop out" or "screw you why didn't they get married".
> 
> Well, that's what happens when you fall in love with an angel.
> 
> Subscribe, give me a review, comment, or a request (as long as your request isn't "go fuck yourself"). 
> 
> Thanks for sticking with it to the end!


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